I actually think b&w photos are too deceptive. I mean too many people literally picture the world at the time to be black and white. Recall that look is just an artificial limit imposed by immature chemical technology. It’s not like people wanted their pictures looking like that.
It’s even a common trope in modern films to use black and white when showing flashbacks to time periods around the beginning of the 20th century. But that’s not how the world looked! It’s a cheep and deceptive tool imho.
> I actually think b&w photos are too deceptive...Recall that look is just an artificial limit imposed by immature chemical technology.
That limit materially constrained the information that could be captured, but it didn't invent false information. It was a dimensionality reduction from color to simple brightness intensity. Sure, the information captured was through that lens/filter, but there wasn't some AI inventing/guessing at what it was seeing. The photons directly exposed the chemicals in the film. They are not equivalent at all, and your reduction based upon the fact that humans add an additional interpretive perspective to each is a stretch.
I say all of this while being fine with colorized photos, but they should be accompanied by the original photo and the disclaimer that they were colorized. I think colorized photos can add a lot of immersion and trigger emotion, but so does generative, interpretive art.
We shouldn't treat Monet's water lilies as an accurate portrayal of his flower garden at his home in Giverny. Colorized photos, while not as extreme as impressionist paintings, are still a generated piece of art. Perhaps they are more akin to portraits, which have been historically shown bias towards an unflattering view of the subject -- as when they are unflattering, they tend to not to survive[1]
This makes my eyes roll like I'm a professional golfer. I love B&W, and even without using B&W film, I will still turn certain color images I take into B&W. There are lots of artistic reasons, but most of the time it just feels right. Sometimes, it's just an aesthetic reason of matching the decor of where the print is going to hang.
>I mean too many people literally picture the world at the time to be black and white.
So what? There are also people that believe the world is flat. There are plenty of museums full of paintings from well before photography was invented that clearly show color. Anyone that believes that the world was in B&W before color film just need to be walked away from as there's nothing but frustration there.
B&W photos don't have a lack of color; they've just restricted the color to certain values. A colorized photo might or might not get the colors correct, but the B&W photo definitely doesn't.
It’s not entirely fake. These colorization processes exaggerate information about the grayscale tones that our eyes can’t pick up due to subtlety or unfamiliarity with the time, place or people depicted. So while the colorized photos are not entirely faithful, they do tell us more about the scene the photo captured.
> These colorization processes exaggerate information about the grayscale tones that our eyes can’t pick up
It is a machine learning model, so not really.
Instead, the model makes an educated guess of the most likely color, based on vast amounts of pictures sampled un-uniformly from very different areas of the world.
Forgive me for the imprecise language—the bases for the educated guesses are the information I was referring to. Humans are not as good at seeing that a certain shade of gray is more likely to be light yellow than light blue, for example. You’re completely right that datasets trained on regions and historical information would produce more accurate results on black-and-white photos identified to the model as being from similar places and times.
That’s discounting the scores of people who prefer to watch cinema in black and white. Many movies are now coming out with black and white variants (Snyder cut of Justice League, Mad Max: Fury Road etc) black and white isn’t going anywhere. Saying this is like saying people won’t want to read books any more because digital text exists.
